Conclusions

Abstract

At intervals in his life Coleridge would try to sum up what it was that he hoped he was achieving. In previous sections it has been argued that in his early career he had high hopes of bringing about a revolution in psychological thinking by demonstrating the working of a level in the subconscious that was in direct communication with the divine, but over the years this conviction was modified. At its highest, as already mentioned above, it amounted to an alignment of the creative principle in the artist with the creative power of God himself: an aspiration which seems to haunt a poem such as ‘Kubla Khan’, but which was modified in time to refer rather to the primary imagination, and the assertion in Biographia Literaria that it was ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Atvt’.¹ Even this reduced form, however, was stroked out by him in one copy, according to his daughter²—presumably as over-presumptuous. Ideas of the kind proved nevertheless to be insuppressible in his work, however swiftly they might be checked by a self-deprecating humility.